Download PDF of this full issue: v44n1.pdf (21.8 MB)

Blurting Out The Lies (poem)

By Mike Hastie

If the US Government is not constantly confronted
with their lies, Americans will constantly believe that
America is exceptional, as Obama recently stated on
national television.

We are living in a make believe culture.
Since the end of World War II, the United States has
bombed 28 countries, and has threatened so many
more countries with its exceptional behavior.

US sanctions against Iraq began in August 1991,
and stayed largely in force until May 2003.
Watching the "60 Minutes" telecast of May 12, 1996,
when Lesley Stahl interviewed then Secretary of State,
Madeleine Albright, is still a shocking piece of truth.
Lesley Stahl asked this question to Madeleine Albright:
"We have heard half a million children have died. I
mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima.

And, you know, is the price worth it?"
Albright replied: "We think the price is worth it."
500,000 Iraqi children died as a result of the US
embargo and sanctions, and weapons of terror
against that country.

In 2008, the population of Wyoming was 532,668.
I have met several Vietnam veteran activists who
went to Iraq during the mid 1990s, and visited the
hospitals in which these children were dying.

When you include deaths from Depleted Uranium,
the facts and pictures that my friends took of the
dying and the dead, were absolutely unimaginable.
That is half the people who were murdered in
Auschwitz during the Nazi Holocaust.

What I am writing here has been written about
by many writers and journalists around the
world for years.

The Iraqi Children Story can easily be researched
on the Internet and many book publications.
But, in America, this madness of truth has
nearly been exterminated.
And, that is why people have to keep writing
about this history, so it doesn't vanish.

In America we deny that 500,000 Iraqi children
died as a result of American tax dollars, because
it is information straight out of hell.

It is extremely important for activists to keep
writing about how dangerous the US Empire is,
otherwise American tax dollars will continue to be
used to stuff the orifices of the dead.

—Mike Hastie
Army Medic Vietnam
September 24, 2013